


on cleanup and other things

by bonehandledknife (ladywinter)



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: F/M, I don't know what to warn for, Issues, Past Rape/Non-con, because immortan joe, like I don't know any fic in this fandom that wouldn't have implied rape?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-29
Updated: 2015-05-29
Packaged: 2018-04-01 19:56:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4032628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladywinter/pseuds/bonehandledknife
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is something strange about her gaze, something determined and dangerous; like she's preparing to crawl out into rushing air and not caring if she comes back same. Max sucks in a breath. Furiosa's loosening the dark wrap around her waist that braces the belts for her arm. He doesn't know what this is, what she's doing. He wants to tell her, '<i>you don't have to</i>.'</p><p>The body armor falls to the ground.</p><p>Max stares at it, sweating. It's rare to see clothing that's not worn. The few times that he'd seen clothes tossed aside so careless, the people inside were already dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	on cleanup and other things

**Author's Note:**

> so this is potentially something like ch 20 of a fic tentatively titled How Does Your Garden Grow.
> 
> Happens after a couple other shenanigans and Things Happen, even sex things, but its over clothing or reaching underneath clothing because they both have Issues (so many Issues) and they've never even undressed because they're both too paranoid. 
> 
> And while Furiosa has her hands-full from an attack/treason from within, Max had gone off to Fuck Shit Up because an attack party's coming in under a sandstorm. Furiosa wins, but gets a talking to from Vuvalini elders going, 'ya'll need to talk, hey we'll be lookouts', and meanwhile Max came back all grimy and everything...

Furiosa looks at him and on anyone else it would be a glare, but her face is loose and her mouth hints amusement even though her jaw is tight and Max feels his welcome despite the desert he carries towards her. She turns away from him with a wry twist of her head, nodding at him to follow her, and moves quickly up and up the stone steps as if carried by his storm.

He doesn't even realize he's following her until he notices she's not getting further away, the both of them cascading up the tower like a rockfall, until they've broken into her rooms. She closes the door behind them and leans against it, working her metal arm loose. Everything feels off-kilter, out of place. _Why are they in her rooms?_ He usually debriefs first, washes up and shares news—

"Hey," Max greets, voice rusted and flaking. Furiosa flicks him a look, but continues working at her belts. He feels oxidized by her presence and stumbles backwards, shoving a table against the wall with the movement.

"Max," she acknowledges, and then pauses and eyes him. Says it again, slow, _"Max."_

He realizes this time that he twitches with her voice, swings his arm out to grab... _something._ Something falls. A chair. And he flails at it, leans its back against the table, tilted. He feels tilted; Furiosa seems tilted. He feels like he should find a basin to skim off the dirt made clay from his sweat and grime. He feels like he doesn’t fit the sound of his name in her voice.

The clawed fingers fall with a clang, and it seems desperately ominous.

There is something strange about her gaze, something determined and dangerous; like she's preparing to crawl out into rushing air and not caring if she comes back same. Max sucks in a breath. Furiosa's loosening the dark wrap around her waist that braces the belts for her arm. He doesn't know what this is, what she's doing. He wants to tell her, _'you don't have to.'_

The body armor falls to the ground.

Max stares at it, sweating. It's rare to see clothing that's not worn. The few times that he'd seen clothes tossed aside so careless, the people inside were already dead.

He darts his eyes up at Furiosa in denial. He sees her, ruddy instead of pale, bright-eyed instead of dim, breathing controlled instead of wheezing, jaw tight. _Jaw tight?_ She's radiating stubbornness just as strongly as he is confusion, and she crouches to remove her shoes, eyes pinning him down. It's the only thing preventing him from moving, but his skin is crawling and he crouches too so that she can read his mouth, so that he faces her full when it forms the question, _'Why?'_

Furiosa just shakes her head, shoes kicked away, whipping her last belt towards a wall, skinning her war pants off. Reckless. Angry. She looks off to the side and mouth shifting like she’s grinding her teeth.

The bottom of her dusky shirt unfurls.

Max stops breathing.

Her shirt, it… well, it's not a shirt. It's a short _dress_ , just barely long enough to cover the darkness between her legs, strips of cotton cloth wrapped around and across and against, simultaneously delicate and ghastly. It's the dress of a Wife.

 _This_ , he thinks wildly, _must have been something of what Immortan Joe saw, when she was owned by him_.

Max wants to throw up.

He tries to walk towards her, palms up, halting, warding. " _Furiosa,_ " the sound tears out, his fingers twitches wanting to stop this, wanting to block her from his view. It's like seeing a seeping wound.

Her grip strikes forward and manacles his left hand, bringing it down. "This is part of me too," she says, voice soft and steely, "It doesn't just disappear." She places his dust-covered hand firmly against her side.

"Don't make me like Joe," Max croaks and tries to yank his hand away. She holds him firm with a bit of struggle. The clay smears across the cloth—

Max blinks away stars, an ache under his jaw, Furiosa's eyes flaring an angry green and the stub of her arm withdrawing from the blow.

_"Fool."_

He doesn't understand his transgression, whether it's comparing himself to the warlord or simply saying the man's name. He doesn’t understand why she would want this. His hand is leaving wide and dark streaks on her and he mutters a bit helplessly, "My hands are dirty."

Furiosa only nods.

Max tilts his head at her.

"The right kind,” she elaborates. She closes her eyes and leans into Max’s touch.

Max, breathing out, is winded and scattershot and lets his other hand be guided against her side by her half-arm. He hesitates and her arm impatiently nudges him. He clasps her waist feeling his skin marring the cloth.

She turns slowly against his hands and the yellow and orange dirt grinds itself into cotton. The skull mocks him on her neck and he obligingly crushes his forehead against it with a sigh that she echoes, as if he's working loose a knot in her shoulders. _Oh._ Blunt fingers guide his hand at her hip down, across a thigh, sweeping inward on his intake of breath and then up across her belly. Rests there, and the muscles underneath slowly, slowly unwinds. _Okay._ He shakes his head against her brand and thinks, _Sorry._

But Max knows she doesn't want pity for the same reason he doesn't. She is wiping away other touches, he now understands, or at least layering another set on like green grown on the fallen. He presses his hands firmly around her waist and then upwards, to cup around her neck loosely, like a necklace, like a chokehold. She tilts her head almost lazily backwards to look at him, a small nod, and then he carefully tightens his grip. Furiosa breathes underneath his fingers, carefully controlled, and he makes sure there’s always a space to do so. He know that others in her past would not have given her such consideration.

Air shudders out of her, shaky, and Furiosa tilts her cheek into his fingers in thanks. Max nods and lets go, palms smoothing along her shoulders, a hard firm touch like trying to skim away another's blood.

"Your hands are getting pretty clean," she notes.

 _Mmm._ Max hums, uncertain. He leans in and bites at her brand.

Furiosa groans and sounds disappointed. With clarity he knows that she almost wants him to bite it off. Perhaps another day, and with some salve at hand; Max clearly has another task in front of him and he wants to see Furiosa's determination through. Her hand curls around his when his palms sweep down to her fingers and she starts guiding it, along her ribs, underneath her breasts, across it; Max is almost hugging her, sand and clay from his clothes smearing across the dress, as he mirrors her guidance with his other hand and keeps the touches firm and predictable. The time around them grows long, stifled and stretched; Max is not sure anymore how long it’s been just—

“ _Move_ ,” she hisses, strangled.

He’s cupping her, thumbs playing at her nipples, backforth _backforth_ , and she shifts against him restlessly as he leaves them be with a gentle squeeze goodbye.

Her back is lovely and muscled like the rest of her, he finds, stepping back an inch (clay raining down from being knocked loose) but perhaps the warlord didn’t like that; she neither moves towards nor away when he spreads his hands wide and sweeps them downward, falling to his knees with a mild clank of brace hitting stone.

Max only realizes afterwards that there’s bits of rock stuck in the cotton dress, maybe quartz, maybe calcite, that pricked and scratched through his palms. His blood leaves streaks on the cloth like the map of a way home (she _is_ ) but Max simply noses against a cloth-covered buttock as his hands finish his journey downwards past thighs and knees.

The grit trapped between his palms and her skin scratch them both, but she only hums at him encouragingly, and reaches behind her to grab a handful of his hair. A _shushhh_ of dirt hits the floor at the motion and there's a hint of laughter in her breath.

Max retaliates by wildly scrubbing his hair all across the cloth in front of him, here brown, there red, a bit of orange, and specked with rock, it only makes her huff more, the fondness clear in the sound, the—

Oh. The.

The motion it— rucks up the skirt a little. Max is polecatted by sight of buttcheek and thigh. _It's just so... so._ Max feels like he's leaping backwards and forwards in moments, jittery, looped, loopy.

"Max."

"Hng?" It takes a great effort of will to look upwards, _it's so pale and incongruous_.

He couldn't meet her eyes for long, he lodestone's back onto that shy curve, _it makes no sense,_ his hands move idly on her thighs trying to ground himself but it doesn't much work. His thumbs finally rest behind her knees and rubs (a surprised groan escapes her mouth) he leans in to bite at those cheeks but—

Furiosa’s knees buckle, she pushes away from his hands in reaction, regaining balance, one leg swung over, and she spins him around until her knees are at his back. His head's pulled up. Her fingers are like a chain against the bottom of his throat.

 _Well this feels familiar_ , he thinks, semi-strangled, looking up at her bracketing him from behind.

 _Quit it_ , her gaze admonishes, _you're distracted_.

Max simply turns his head to the side and plants his face into her thigh, nuzzling, _can you blame me_ ; no actual chains holding him back this time, nothing impair his breathing, his speaking, unless you count her.

 _She always counts_ , he thinks.

Her body shakes a little and he rolls her eyes up and her eyes have laughter in them.

 _Here,_ her hand leads him, dragging him up by the chin, he mouthes at everything along the way, following with his bleeding hands, dusty arms, pressed close, leaving bits of himself and his travels against her. She pauses him at chest-height and gives him a _look_ and only a fool would open his mouth and give her another bite.

(She named him well.)

Although through the cloth it probably feels more like a nip, he apologizes by darkening the clothed nipple with tongue and spit and her breath matches his as she grows harder against his lips.

A breath in; then a hand is fisted in his jacket hauling him upwards, pushing him backwards into the chair which he falls into, and he has enough room to finally see Furiosa in full.

And she—

She is ragged, she is _sandstorm_ , she is the desert made flesh; she is clay and cliff-side and shelter and, yes, _fury_.

And she stalks towards him.

Max barely braces himself before she is in his lap, they almost tip over, but he shoves his weight forward, and a pained sound comes from her. He meets her gaze and then they both look down, and she shifts her hips back a bare inch as they scrabble for his belt.

"Buckle," she mutters angrily. _Yeah,_ he thinks, but then it's open and she throws it aside, surges upwards as he surges upward as they’re shoving his pants down barely midthigh and neither of them have the patience for more. Max finds himself hard with half-surprise, he didn't even realize when he'd started to be, needs to slide the chair hastily backwards as she ground down against him again and is relieved when the seat rucks up against the table braced against the wall. He barely gets ahold of her, his arm around her waist to give her something to balance against, the other splayed backwards over the table.

The first pass of her lower lips against his erection is the softest kiss of skin, Furiosa's partial forearm braces against his shoulder, hand clenched in his hair, eyes pressing into his as her hips grinds down. The second pass is draggy and damp, the friction curling up his toes, he doesn’t remember ever feeling like this, and he’s not even _in her_ — but the third stroke's fully _wet_ and they both shudder at the slick. Max thrills at it; anything wet in this wasteland feels like a goddamned _miracle_  (and she is, she _is_ ). Sunspots chase him as he drives his hip up against decadent liquid skin, he shoves and she meets him and it's all he can do to hang on; he's stopped feeling his left leg several passes ago, everything a bright flare, Furiosa's gaze dragging him forward like the wet suck of her skin against his, like hurtling down vertical in a car on nitrous, lungs burning chemical.

He shoves a hand in, between one thrust and the next, rides his thumb up her clit and she _ignites_ with it, with his light slick nudges, catching, with Max’s heart's pounding as he watches, with lungs helpless as he breathes her— in more than he does air.

—and Furiosa collapses, motor cut, panting and flushed and mouth pleased. Max guides her down, a happy humming. He strokes the sweat from her face but it just leaves more streaks of clay. He tries anyway. She looks settled in her skin finally, and he wants to touch that and feel like he has permission to be there.

A little knot grows between her eyebrows and Max tries to wiggle it away with a thumb but she tosses her head and his touch away and looks down.

Max looks down too, shrugs, and looks back at her. Stops her hand from reaching for his dick, half-hard. _It doesn't matter,_ he thinks, bringing their laced hands up to his mouth and pressing a kiss against them. He feels languid and sated and aglow. He feels full with something he doesn't even know the name for.

Furiosa measures him for a couple racing heartbeats.

Then nods, mouth going less tight, leaning in and kissing their woven-together bones on the knuckles.

"You will tell me if there is anyth—"

He waves her order off. "Yeah."

They breathe together for awhile on that chair, heartbeats settling down, messy (but feeling washed clean).

.

.

.

**Author's Note:**

> 1) [Here are pictures of Furiosa's top compared to cloth/dresses worn by the wives](http://bonehandledknife.tumblr.com/post/119875564405/mad-max-costuming) at my journal that pretty much inspired this whole thing.
> 
> 2) no seriously this thing was distracting me from soulmark fic, I super need to finish that first because it's shorter ugh, but if I don't post this it might never post? #Idon'ttrustmywip #ficproblems


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